10 Jan Email To Drive One In Five Cyber Monday Sales

The figures are in, and email is again bucking the trend. According to Adobe Digital Insights, it greatly increased its share of directing and influencing Cyber Monday sales while the two channels that ranked above it — search and direct traffic — dipped.

In fact, the role of email in driving sales was up nearly a third compared to last year, while search and direct traffic each saw a dip of around 5% in their contribution to Cyber Monday sales. So that meant that very nearly one in five items sold over Cyber Monday were driven by email, while roughly a third and a quarter of all sales were driving by search and direct traffic. This puts mail in third place, as it was on Black Friday, but the key point is that the two channels above are starting to weaken. It’s also arguable that email plays a large role in keeping brands fresh in the minds of consumers and so could well play an important role in driving direct traffic.

Social media, interestingly, doesn’t get given a percentage of sales. When Adobe did grade the channel alongside email for Black Friday sales, the comparison was pretty embarrassing. It delivered just under 1% of sales compared to email’s near 18%.

So, there you have it. Email absolutely thrashed social on Black Friday — in fact, it wasn’t even a contest. It drove a fifth of sales and was the only of the three top sales drivers to see substantial growth compared to last year.